


Almost A Memory

by Mistystarshine



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-29
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-11 22:41:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4455245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mistystarshine/pseuds/Mistystarshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A home isn't always a place, and a story isn't always a story. Sometimes it's easier to forget than cling to regretful memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Almost A Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aimisam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimisam/gifts).



> My apologies if this makes little sense, it is very much a train-of-thought piece and was meant to have a relatively dreamy air to it.

The world was a strange place. Filled with excitement, people, adventure, mysteries, he just wanted to absorb it all. But he couldn’t. For the longest time, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t have the same experiences as other trolls, just that it wouldn’t work. He was different.

Different was bad.

His lusus said that it wasn’t, but he knew. He knew it in the way they avoided large crowds, the air of secrecy they cared, how he was told that he mustn't ever let someone see him bleed. He was different and that was bad. He just didn’t know why.

* * *

Other lusii were white. His was jade and a troll.

Tyrian, violet, purple, blue, cerulean, teal, jade, olive, yellow, brown, rust. Those were the colors of the hemospectrum. Those were the colors of blood. But when he bled he bled red. That was wrong. That was a crime. He still didn’t understand why.

It wasn’t long after he started to understand what his blood meant that the young troll began to think that this world might be a little warped.

* * *

He wasn’t the only one who wasn’t normal. The little yellow wasn’t as strange as he was, but he wasn’t normal either. With his double-horns and alarmingly powerful psonics, his mutation wasn’t one that would get him killed but one that would get him bound to a ship for the rest of his life. The little red troll didn’t think he’d like to see that happen.

The little yellow troll didn’t have a white lusus because he didn’t have any lusus. Not wanting to see him left alone, the little red offered to share his lusus.

His jade lusus accepted with a tinkling laugh. She had always been nicer than the other lusii seemed to be. If only there was a different word for her.

 

* * *

Over time he came to decide that his being different wasn’t wrong at all, not really. He wasn’t bad. He was different, and maybe that different was good. It opened him up to thoughts that the rest of society didn’t dare to think.

Those thoughts went on to form words. He spoke to the yellow, and the yellow listened. He spoke and began to wonder if others might listen as well.

He spoke and the dreams started. Although they brought with them new visions, a word that wasn’t perfect but was undeniably better than the one he lived in, they also brought with them unspeakable sorrow. They showed him traces of a time when it was more than himself, the yellow, and his lusus. Visions of people he could almost see, almost remember, and knew he hadn’t appreciated.

The dreams brought with them opportunities and change. But sometimes, when he looked at what might have been (or was it what used to be?) he wished he would never have to sleep.

* * *

He wasn’t as young as he used to be when he found her, but he wasn’t fully grown either. She had been hunting when she spotted and attacked him. He had freaked out, screamed like a wriggler, and finally gotten around to talking. (Talking, begging not to be harmed. He his home may be those he traveled with rather than four walls and a roof, but she was wild in a way he could never imagine.)

She saw his blood and asked him to explain. So he spoke, told her of his visions, his dreams, the world that couldn’t be. He didn’t mention that she looked like someone he may have known once. Another olive blood, one who loved love so much she failed to notice as her free will was sapped away from her.

In the end, his home grew by one more.

* * *

She infuriated him sometimes. Wild and teasing, playful yet threatening, calling him closer but forever refusing to be caught. He talked to the yellow about it. “Spades,” the yellow had suggested, but no, there was more to it than that. What they had couldn’t be reduced down to the fierce rivalry of the black quadrant. He wanted to kiss and adore her as you would a heart, comfort and treasure her like a diamond. When a traveler pushed too far they acted as each other’s club. These feelings pushed against each other, blurred the lines until their emotions were so well-blended they couldn’t begin to separate them.

Oh well. He loved her, that much he knew. He loved her in a way he didn’t love the yellow or the lusus, although they too found themselves subject to affection that couldn’t be placed in one of those four squares.

Why try to limit something that had the potential to grow into something great?

* * *

The red blood was willing to speak to the yellow, the lusus, and the olive. They listened to him and didn’t criticize him. The one he grew to be so close to, lovers as they were, clung to his every word and recorded them. Eventually, his pool of speech would grow. Those three, then travelers, strangers, two people passing by and sharing a whisper.

His word came to be one that was heard across the world.

* * *

As word spread, another began to form. Words had power, and this one seemed to have the power to change things. Some liked that. Others didn’t. Those who didn’t were the ones working the keep the world as it was. They were the ones with the ability to stop the change.

The red knew the risk, and still he spoke. The red spoke. The olive recorded. The yellow served. The jade… there still is no word for what she did. Perhaps that is because words would not do it justice.

* * *

Their home was not a place but four people and a seed of hope. Didn’t they know that people are breakable and hope crushable?

* * *

When they caught them it wasn’t pretty. They fought, but it wasn’t enough. The red was tied up, broken, stripped of everything that he had been or ever could be. His home was gone and his hope shattered. An angry, broken creature, so much unlike the one who had once spewed pointless words in a dream or spoke with the power to change the world.

When the arrow pierced his heart, he died looking at the tyrian woman whom he may have known, may have been his friend, once in a world that they would never know.

* * *

What happened next? What of the others? The creature strung up in the helmsblock, one who may have been yellow once, doesn’t know. The story swims through his mind again and again, always ending in a scream and roar of engines. What happened to the olive and the lusus? The helmsman doesn’t know. That would sting even more than the shattered ending of the red, the realization that he doesn’t know the names (colors, colors are important, he just doesn’t know why), if helmsmen were capable of such emotion.

Thought is a hard thing for a helmsman to come by. Yet sometimes, when it’s a good day and the ability reaches him, he doesn’t think that the characters would have regretted living their tragic, pointless story.

He doesn’t think they would have regretted their family.


End file.
